The Good, The Bad, It's All Stuck In My Head

I love music. I think about it all the time. In almost every moment of my spare time some variety of music or another is playing in the background. Sometimes in the foreground. I am one of those people who can just sit down and listen to an album in its entirety. I find this exciting. I actively listen. It's not passive. That's how much I love music.

But sometimes it goes too far.

My all-consuming need to constantly have music in my ears, from time to time does backfire. I listen to an extreme quantity of music. I play it back in my mind when no recorded music output device is available. So I often pass the time waiting in lines silently enjoying some Bossa Nova. But other times it goes horribly wrong.

And when it goes wrong, it goes wrong. You know exactly what I am talking about here: having a bad song stuck in your head. This happens to everybody. It's obnoxious, to say the least. But in my case the experience often transcends obnoxious- it can be tedious, painful, maddening, and even down right torturous.

I shit you not. Allow me to explain. I am not in full control of my mind. There is no way in hell that I could possibly explain many of the degradingly inane tunes stuck in my head. Listen:

When I was a sophomore in college I woke up at least on morning a week, for several months mind you, with "Stripes" by Johnny Cash pumping through my brain. And when I say pumping, I mean pounding. Oh, and it wasn't the whole song either- it was just the first line of the refrain. So I would wake up having, "I got stripes, stripes around my shoulder..." rattling back and forth between my ears. Over and over again. It caused me great trauma. I love Johnny Cash, but nonetheless, this aggression will not stand.

A few summers ago I had the theme song from "The Bloodhound Gang" on 3-2-1 Contact stuck in my head for about two weeks. It wasn't constant, but I spent at least one out of aver 5 minutes thinking about it. That's almost three whole days of my life that I'll never get back. It was tedious. "Whenever there's trouble, we're there on the double. We're the Bloodhound Gang..." This still troubles me from time to time. Like right now. What the hell was PBS trying to do to me?

That same summer I had the first two words of that allegedly funny old song "Winchester Cathedral" stuck in my head. These words are: "Winchester Cathedral". Sung in some variety of a silly voice. I don't know any of the rest of the song, but I do know the "Winchester Cathedral" part. So don't ask. I can't tell you, but I can hurt you. I owe this all to the "Wacky Favorites" CD advertisement that Cartoon Network used to show every damned commercial break. I am still angry about this.

Last weekend I had the "see ya real soon" part of the Mickey Mouse Club song popping in and out of my mental ear with some regularity. Then, two days ago, somebody was wondering around the office singing the entire theme song. If I weren't so lazy I would have punched his lights out.

And just now I was party to a convergence of bad cosmic waves, as several of the Evil Robots staff had "Under Pressure" in their heads. This was bad, but explainable. The joint we ate lunch in was playing it. Why does the universe insist on making a mockery of me? Granted, it is cool being party to a broadcast from the meta-radio, but why Queen? Once, as Princess, Sketchy, and I were lounging about in the beach of Key Biscayne in Miami, Princess and I started humming "Cloudy" by Simon & Garfunkle simultaneously. That was fantastic. Queen is insulting.

So why does this happen? Why do we get songs stuck in our heads? Are these songs being broadcast into our minds ear by some sort of a deity? Or maybe radio waves are more powerful than science is willing to admit. That could be. On some level my psyche demands that this is the case: there is no way that I possess so much self-loathing that my subconscious forces these horrible, horrible punches in the face upon myself.